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SYNTHESE LIBRARY
STUDIES IN EPISTEMOLOGY,
Managing Editor:
Editors:
VOLUME 178
ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY
IN
COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE
Exploratory Essays in Current Theories and
Classical Indian Theories of Meaning and Reference
Edited by
and
DORDRECHT/BOSTON/LANCASTER
Ubrary of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Preface ix
Index 393
We dedicate this volume to
the memory of
Professor Kalidas Bhattacharya
who died suddenly
when the volume was in preparation
PREFACE
1.
philosophical thinking.
I have already noted elsewhere (Matilal, 1968) that the
psychological part of the Brentano thesis was well recognized
by the Navya-Naiyayikas of India. Thus Gadadhara (17th cen-
tury A.D.) remarked that the 'self-transcending reference to
some OBJECT' (sa-visayakatva) is the necessary mark of our
psychological attitudes such as 'cognition' (which covers epi-
sodic belief and all other cognitive attitudes), 'desire/will'
(iccha), and 'effort or intention to act' (krti). The Nai-
yayikas being, however, hard-headed realists (as Brentano
was), rejected the notion of a special mode of being to be
attributed to the 'objects' of cognition or desire. But they
showed their ambivalence. They regarded such OBJECTS as iden-
tical with either the real objects of the actual world or
(where such objects do not exist) the composite objects which
are constructed out of bits and pieces of the real objects and
must therefore be analysed or broken down so that their segre-
gated parts may be identified with such bits and pieces of
reality.
Philosophers of both India and the West have tried to
resolve the dubious ontological status of the 'objects' of
psychological attitudes in various ways. Consider:
1. Tom is thinking about a unicorn.
2. Tom believes (i.e., misperceives) there to be
a particular snake (when in reality there is
a rope).
Despite the obvious differences here, I propose to treat 1 and
2 as similar and on a par as far as the question of the onto-
logical status of 'the snake' and 'the unicorn' is concerned.
The following four broadly possible answers are generally
available:
A. An intentional SNAKE is produced there by
the mental act itself. Hence there emerges
an actual snake--distinct from the mental
act--but it has a different mode of being--
-different from both being the actually
existent snake and being the non-existent
one (being nothing). This is generally com-
patible with Brentano's earlier view, as
well as with the Advaita Vedanta view that
such an OBJECT has a being which is inexpli-
cable either as existent or as non-existent
(cf. sad-asad-anirvacaniya).
B. No object is produced by the thought or the
mental act concerned. The so-called SNAKE
or UNICORN in the context is either
4 B. K. MATILAL
Kripke has claimed that proper names of our language are rigid
designators in this sense.
It seems that certain terms of our language (such as a
proper name, say 'Scott') must be rigid designators in a cer-
tain sense, for otherwise we would not be able to make coun-
terfactual assertions with the help of such terms, as we actu-
ally do. This is Kripke's intuitive argument in favour of the
notion of rigid designators. A counterfactual such as "Scott
might not have written Ivanhoe" would not mean what it means
unless "Scott" designated the same person in both the actual
world where he wrote Ivanhoe and the possible world where he
did not. When such terms come in pairs such that they desig-
nate the same object, then even in modal contexts they lend
themselves to the substitutivity of identity.
In the logic of belief or in epistemic logic, a vivid
designator is the analogue of rigid designator (n. Kaplan,
"Quantifying In", 1969). For the believer, Tom, a term is a
vivid designator when there exists a specific thing that he
believes (or knows) it designates. Such terms will therefore
freely instantiate quantifications and are subject to the sub-
stitutivity of identity in belief contexts.
A Quinean extensionalist argues that semantic considera-
tions of quantified modal logic invoke the notion of essence
or essentialism. The concept of. a rigid designator is sus-
tained by the talk of 'possible worlds'. Quine continues:
Talk of possible worlds is a graphic way of wag-
ing the essentialist philosophy, but it is only
that; it is not an explication. Essence is
needed to identify an object from one possible
world to another.
(Theories and Things,
Cambridge, Mass., p. 118)
The extensionalist insists that both notions, that of rigid
designator and vivid designator, are dependent upon some con-
text or other, and empty otherwise. Our notion of necessity
is context-dependent. For relatively only to ~ particular
inquiry, some predicates may be treated as playing a more
basic role than others, and these may be treated as necessar-
ily so. It may be necessary for a mathematician to be
rational but it is not necessary (essential) for him to have
two legs intact. But if the mathematician is also a cyclist
it is necessary for him to be two-legged. Only with regard to
sucn background groupings and other information, we can dis-
tinguish between 'essences' and 'accidents'. Quine writes:
AN INTRODUCTION
2.
1 . .8. Universals
Bhattacharya (s) tries to sort out our perennial puzzles about
universals and answer a few well-known objections about
abstraction. His observations particularly on Quine and Witt-
genstein are significant. What he develops as his Theory A
seems to be based substantially upon the Navya-Nyaya view
although there is no explicit reference to Nyaya except in
the title of the paper. He suggests that the traditional dif-
ficulties with the concept of universal could to a large
extent be avoided if we formulated the problem in a different
way. Following the Nyaya view, for example, we may formulate
the point in this way: Let universals be postulated, roughly
speaking, as the 'reason or ground or basis for the applica-
tion of general terms' to different individuals; this reason
(pravrttinimitta) is sometimes called 'meaning' (artha) and
sometimes 'determinant of the meaning relation' (cf. sakya-
tavacchedaka, more literally, delimitor of the denotative
power of the word) in Nyaya. As I have already noted, this
denotative power is nothing but a conventional 'power' infused
into the word by some original "dubbing" situation. At some
points Bhattacharya (S) seems to endorse the "essence" view of
the universals, and in this way he comes closer to the view of
some proponents of the New Theory of Reference.
Bhattacharya (5) seems to stop short of endorsing the
Nyaya view completely. He rightly talks about a relation
which should be part of the Nyaya postulation of universals
as real entities over and above the particulars. (One may
contrast this point about a real relation with that of Kling
who has been criticized by Gochet.) However Bhattacharya (5)
further notes that if universals are only posits or postulates
one need not bother about asking such questions about the
reality of relation between a universal and a particular.
Explaining the example "marriage" (Strawson's example) he
makes the point that neither all 'abstract' relations be uni-
versals nor all abstract expressions denote repeatable proper-
ties. There are so-called abstract expressions which in fact
may stand for different unrepeatable features or facts.
(Nyaya calls them either an upadhi or a svarupasambandha-
visesa.)
While the concern of Bhattacharya (K) has been to see
whether and in what way the modern worries about meaning in
the West have been connected with the traditional issues of
philosophy, Bhattacharya (5) has taken a particular theory of
universals from traditional India (Nyaya) and reconstructed
it in bare outlines in order to meet some age-old objections
against universals. In fact a non-committal attitude towards
the objectivity of universals may not entirely go against the
spirit of some Naiyayikas. As noted already, if the basis
for application of a count name like 'chef' is exhausted by
AN INTRODUCTION 29
l.~ Psychologism
Mohanty deals with an important question, that of psycholo-
gism, as it may arise in connection with our discussion of
Indian logical theories in contemporary terms. 'What he says
here is particularly instructive and suitable for a volume
such as this one. For when it is stated that Indian 'logi-
cians' deal with not propositions but mental occurrences that
we may call cognitive EVENTS, one usually faces the obvious
question from those who are trained in the logical theories of
Frege, Russell, etc.: Does it not reduce all Indian logical
thinking to a sort of fruitless psychologism? Mohanty has
shown that Nyaya supplies an alternative model for a logical
theory that avoids the pitfalls of psychologism and extends
the boundary of our logical thinking beyond the available mod-
els of the so-called Frege-Russell tradition.
Each cognitive episode or awareness-event has a structure
or a form (which Mohanty is inclined to call 'intentional con-
tent' following the convenient terminology of Phenomenology).
It is the same structure that Potter (see below) has called
"contents" (and Potter has immediately emphasized that they
are "always exhaustively composed of real items"). An aware-
ness-event (as I usually call it) is both a particular and a
momentary occurrent. They are much like the word-tokens or
utterance-tokens and individuated by the moments of occurrence
as well as by the subjects or persons in whom they arise or
occur. But from the point of view of conceptual analysis and
formulation of logical laws the identity condition of an
awareness-event is given solely by its structural content.
This structural content can be represented in language by an
utterance, but it need not be so expressed in each case. How-
ever a structural description of such a content is always pos-
sible in language, and if the structural representations of
two or more such events totally coincide (ignoring for the
moment the problems presented by the indexicals), such events
are treated as mere tokens for the 'same' awareness, i.e., the
same type. In other words, for the purpose of logical and
analytical study, the fact that they may arise at different
times and in different persons is irrelevant. Mohanty suc-
cessfully contrasts this notion with the Western notion of
propositions and argues that this need not be confused with
the 'propositions' of Western logic. (~ee also Potter.)
The so-called 'logical' laws of Indian philosophers,
Mohanty says, are no doubt given in psychological terms, but
since it follows an eidetic psychology of cognitions, the
30 B. K. MATILAL
inference or anumana.
Broadly speaking, in svarthanumana or what we sometimes
translate as 'inference-for-one's-own-self' the Indian theo-
rists exploit the psychological technique of drawing an infer-
ence or reaching a piece of knowledge based upon evidence, and
in oararthanumana or what we call 'inference-for-others'
this technique is articulated in speech (language) so as to
demonstrate its soundness to others. This 'psychological
technique' however does not render the theory totally psycho-
logistic in any pejorative sense (as has been argued already
by Mohanty and Potter). It conceives of an ideal agent (or an
ideal observer in the case of pratyaksa) who obtains knowl-
edge in this way from some sound evidence. The evidence will
be infallible, it is claimed, if it fulfills the so-called
triple condition (of the Buddhists) or the quintuple condition
(of Nyaya).
Since the goal in a pramana theory (epistemology?) is
to state how we obtain knowledge (prama) and not simply what
constitutes a valid argument, this account of anumana seems
to be quite adequate for the purpose. However this provides a
very different model for 'logic', if we may use the term at
all in the context. Logicians who are interested only in for-
mal validity or consistency lying in abstraction in a string
of so-called propositions, a string that we call argument,
need not be disappointed at this treatment of anumana if they
recognize the model here for what it is. It serves a differ-
ent purpose in a different context (the pramana theory). In
other words, the theory of anumana need not be an outlandish
model for 'inference' even for a Westerner, provided we under-
stand it as a part of what we may call the Indian program for
systematic epistemology.
l.12 Designation and Related Designation
Siderits focuses upon the problem of how we derive the 'sen-
tence-meaning' from the analysis of its components, words and
their meanings. The two schools of Mima~sa, the Prabha-
kara and the Bhatta, held opposite views on this issue.
Briefly, the first contends that the sentence-meaning is given
by the words directly, not through the meanings of the words
concerned while the second believes that it is given only
through the meanings of the words. Following Siderits, we can
call the first the theory of 'related designation' and the
second the theory of 'designated relation'. The nearest
equivalent of this controversy in the West would be the modern
discussion of the 'context principle' versus the 'composition
principle' in semantics.
Siderits elaborates the PrAbhAkara view of 'related
designation' which is based upon the strong intuition that
word-meanings are seldom learned in isolation (i.e., apart
32 B. K. MATILAL
In this section I will set out Skyrms' result for S5 and prove
it in a form which will allow easy generalization to my prin-
cipal theorems.!
We begin with a language Lo [14, p. 3'69) which is inter-
preted by a class ~ 0 of models (Skyrms does not give this
class a namej it will emerge in a moment that it is important
to do so). Skyrms is very liberal in deciding what can count
as a model. A model is in fact any structure which assigns
truth values to formulae of Lo. I shall use MFa to mean
that a is true in the model M and M ~ a to mean that a is not
true in the model M. The models are all assumed to be bi-va-
lent but otherwise subject only to the condition that they
respect the truth functors. In section two I shall drop this
latter requirement, but in section one, in the exposition of
Skyrms, I shall retain it.
Given then our class of models ~o, indexed-by some set
I, we have it that each model MOi in ~o gives to every sen-
tence of Lo a truth value. Based on Lo we erect languages of
two kinds, first a modal language LHj and second a family of
languages Ln which combine to produce a language 4D.
39
(i) If a E LD then
Mni+! l= a iff Mn i t= a
(ii) If a is Lp and p E LD then
Mni+1 F a iff MDi F a
for every j E I.
(Note how (ii) makes reference to other n-level models besides
WE ARE ALL CHILDREN OF GOD 41
then Mn' ~ a iff Mo' F a and so the theorem holds for atomic
formulae.
Suppose that a is -~ and that the theorem hold~ for ~.
Now i ff ~ E Ln then a E L.. So
(W,V) F, a iff (W,V) 9, ~
iff M.' =f C(~)
iff M.' F -C(~)
iff M.' F C(-~)
THEOREM 1.4 For any wff a of LM, if C(a) is valid in all mod-
els of Lwthen a is a theorem of propositional 55.
iff
Each Me.:) is the union of all the Moi's, and~wis the class
where a E L
We construct ~w in the following way. Where a is an
atomic sentence we simply define Mo~ F a iff x E yea). Since
an atomic sentence a E L. for every n then the theorem holds
for atomic sentences of 2 We suppose that it holds for
a 1, , ak in L. and cons ider a k-place functor 5 and the
wff oa1 . ak in L.+1. To deal with this case we must define
the relation R. Now R may be a relation between modals of any
level but it suffices to assume that it has already been
defined for classes of models for Lmc. and that it will later
be defined for classes of models for L m >
Let R be the following relation:
R holds between Mn ~ +1 and the classes A1, , Ak of models
of L. iff there are wff a1, , ak of L. such that
A1, ,Ak are respectively la11., ... , lakl. and
where a E LD.
All we need to do is to define V. If a E Lo then
i E V(a) iff Mo i ~ a. If 0 is a k-place functor then V(o) is
defined as follows:
Let i E I; and let a!, ... , ak be subsets of I;
then i E V(o)(al, ... , ak) iff there exist wff
ai, ... , ak in some LD such that ah = {i E I :
MDi = ah} (1 $ h $ k) and
So Mj i +! R (I a! I j.
(1~!lj . . . . . I~klj).
. laklj) iff Mji+! R
as required.
This establishes the inductive step, and therefore proves
the theorem. Theorems 2.1 and 2.2 are the principal results
of the paper.
Let us suppose now that there is a collection of sen-
tences. of Lw which form a logic /I. in the sense that there is a
class of models ~Z; in which precisely the members of /I. are
valid. What theorem 2.2 shews is that there is an intensional
model in which precisely the members of /I. are true in every
world. Conversely Theorem 2.1 shews that if there is an
intensional model (like the canonical models of modal logic)
in which precisely the members of /I. are true in all worlds
then there is a class:ffiG) of metalinguistic models which pre-
cisely define validity in /I.. (Conditions under which a set /I.
of sentences will be a logic in this sense will be discussed
in section four.)
3. LOGICAL CONSTANTS
There is what appears at first sight to be a very important
difference between what was done in section one and what was
done in section two. In section one it was shewn how a col-
lection of models ~o for Lo induced a unique collection ~('J
of models for .L W _ In section two~~) depended not merely on
5. DOUBLE INDEXING
(i) If a E Lo then
Moi h a iff (W,V) l=(i,i;' a
(ii) With each k-place functor 0 we associate
the k+l relation R between models of Ln+I and
k-tuples of classes of models of L. defined as
follows:
6. CONCLUSION
NOTES
REFERENCES
R. K. Matilal and J. L. Shaw (eds.), Analytical Philosoph.1' ill Comparative Perspective, 61-80.
1985 by D. Reidel Publishing Company.
62 P. GOCHET
x < y = (z) (z 0 X ~ Z 0 y)
It looks as if Goodman was immune to KUng's criticism of the
descriptive predicates since they are no longer predicates in
Goodman's treatment, but remained open to his criticism for
the predicate "overlaps" and its derivatives. Later I will
show that this objection can be met if we revive and adjust to
our purpose a theory of predication outlined in 1949 by H.
Leblanc, a theory which will prove congenial to some claims
made by KUng himself when he is discussing the nature of the
identity-relation.
Kung criticizes both Goodman'and Quine for their ~
categorematic account of predicates. Hence a full response to
KUng's objections against Goodman's theory of predication
requires a detailed examination of Quine's treatment of predi-
cates. That treatment is really the paradigm case of a syn-
categorematic treatment. One should here bear in mind that
Quine developed his theory to its extreme limits: even class
abstracts and relation abstracts are shown to be amenable to a
syncategorematic treatment in certain cases. I have in mind
here the virtual theory of classes and relations which was
presented by Quine in Set Theory and ~ Logic after a sugges-
tion due to R. Martin.
The virtual theory of classes and relations emerged out
of a cluster of doctrines among which one finds the critierion
of ontological commitment. Quine's criterion of ontological
commitment reads as follows: "In general, entities of a given
sort are assumed by a theory if and only if some of them must
be counted among the values of the variables in order that the
statements affirmed in the theory be true".13 If we combine
this statement with the claim that only names are replaceable
by quantified variables, we have to conclude that predicates
are not equipped to carry ontological commitment. A problem
arises in connection with the law of concretion:
y E {x : Fx} = Fy
On the right side of the equivalence sign we have a predicate
and on the left we have a class abstract which occupies a name
position. Shall we read a hidden class-abstract in the predi-
cate "Fy" and say that predicates carry ontological commit-
ments to sets after all, or shall we demote the class abstract
to the status of a syncategorematic expression comparable to
"Fy"?
Occam's razor settles the issue. We will say, Quine sug-
gests, that "the whole combination "y E {x : Fx}" reduces, by
... the law of concretion, to "Fy", so that there remains no
hint of there being such a thing as the class {x: FX}".14
From this, by a very quick and productive move, Quine invented
the virtual theory of classes: "Turning the tables and
THE SYNCATEGOREMATIC TRFATMENT OF PRFDICATES 65
with Kung and Waragai, but not on the positive side. I fail
to see any explanatory power in the notions of "concrete prop-
erty" or "modes of being". To the repetition of the predicate
"Wise" one could just as well associate the identity of the
individuals taken severally, which those predicates are true
of or multiply denote along the lines of Martin. The state-
ment that individuals are multiply denoted by the same predi-
cate because they share the same concrete property or mode of
being may be true but as we have no independent access to
properties such a statement fails to count as a solution to
Kung's puzzle.
A statement such as "There are no unicorns" is no count-
er-example to my thesis. As Quine says in "On Not Learning to
Quantify", "Truly unrestricted quantification is rare outside
logic.,,34 The above statement can be read as "a categorical
with tacit first term." The categorical I have in mind is
Wh~tever exists is a non-unicorn
(x) [(3y) (y=x) J -Ux]
As a quantification theory requires a non empty universe, we
will have at least one individual standing as a value for the
variable "x" which occurs twice and serves to carry out the
subject-predicate duplication.
It might be thought that I changed the topic when I moved
from Kung's picture theory of predicate to Leblanc's picture
theory of predication. I would like to show how the two theo-
ries are related. With this I will bring my discussion to a
close.
For quite a long time Quine held the view that the ontol-
ogy needed by physics was made of "physical objects, classes
of them, classes in turn of the elements of this combined
domain, and so on Up.,,3S A fact about microphysics led him to
change his mind. The fact is reported in The Scientific Amer-
ican (1973) by Post.
If we consider two electrons ~ and y and two boxes East
Box and West Box, we think of four possible locations for the
electrons. Yet statistical findings, says Post, show that two
of the four possibilities acknowledged by common sense col-
lapse into one. From this Quine concludes that "we should
think not of individual electrons ~ and y but of states of the
boxes: ... states of being singly or doubly affected."36
This does not boil down to the replacing of an ontology
of electrons by an ontology of states. States are predicates
which are attributed to space-time regions, i.e. to sets of
space-time points. But, as Quine observes, "we can invoke
Cartesian coordinates and identify each space-time point with
a mere quadruple of real numbers."37
Predicates that formerly attributed states to points or
regions will now apply to quadruples of numbers, or to sets of
THE SYNCATEGOREMATIC TREATMENT OF PREDICATES 77
University of Liege
78 P. GOCHET
NOTES
20. W.V.O. Quine: 1980, Word and Object, Wiley, New York, pp.
96-97.
27. W.V.O. Quine: 1960, Word and Object, Wiley, New York, pp.
90-91.
1.
2.
3.
Of course, there are plenty of different kinds of semantical
theories all directed towards problems of referential opacity
and related matters. So it may seem surprising that anyone
should think we had exhausted all our options so soon. What
about inscriptional ism? Frege's own shift-of-reference view?
Hintikka's theory of world-lines? All the solutions that
Quine considers in his various writings on this topic? Etc.
Some of these, such as naive inscriptionalism, are plainly
inadequate from the beginning. More c'ommonly, though, a view
will be seen to collapse into the Russellian option even
though the view seems more elaborate and mobilizes sophisti-
cated apparatus. One such view is Frege's, as I read him. He
hypothesizes that inside a (single) belief operator, a name
shifts its reference from its customary bearer to its custom-
ary sense, an abstract constituent of the "thought" or propo-
sition named by the complement clause as a whole; what causes
substitutivity failure is that distinct names normally have
distinct customary senses even though they may happen to have
the same customary referents. But in Frege's examples,s the
senses of names are expressed in the form of definite descrip-
tions, implying that names have the senses of descriptions.
Thus Frege seems committed to (II-a) and open to Kripke's
objections. 9
A more interesting example of a sophisticated theory that
seems to collapse into Russellianism is Hintikka's classic
possible-worlds version of Frege's approach 1969) and else-
where). Hintikka holds that inside belief contexts names
name, not the ordinary" inhabitants of our world, but "individ;-
uating functions" or world-lines. Each world-line, corre-
sponding roughly (but not exactly) to a Fregean individual
concept, is a function from worlds to individual inhabitants
of those worlds. (On Hintikka's view, actually, it is the
world-line itself that corresponds to a real individual, since
real individuals such as you and I come complete with counter-
factual properties as well as the actual properties we have
here at @. This leaves us with the uncomfortable question of
what sorts of things the values of world-lines are. Hintik-
ka's followers sometimes call them "individual manifestations
at" worlds; or we might call them world-slices of individu-
als.) Each world line, associated with a proper name N, is
determined or generated by a particular "method of
86 w. LYCAN
Broccoli causes
flat feet.
realizing that that was what they were doing. Hartry Field,
Jerry Fodor, David Lewis, Stephen Stich, and most recently
John Perry have hinted at it. 24 But, interestingly, they have
in effect taken sides (different sides) on which of the two
schemes is correct, or at least on which is vital to the con-
cept of belief and which negligible. Fodor and Lewis assume
that beliefs are essentially causal entities invoked to
explain behavior and that their semantical properties are by
the way, while Stich and Perry insist that the truth-values of
beliefs (and the reliability of informants) are what matter
and that explaining behavior isn't so important after all.
Now, this seems to me a funny sort of thing to quarrel abou~.
Sometimes we're interested in explaining and predicting behav-
ior; at other times we're interested in truth and reliability.
Which of these interests is objectively paramount seems to me
an idle question. And if my Sellarsian semantics is right,
our language affords us a pragmatic choice in belief ascrip-
tion, that matches our pair of alternative interests nicely.
Does ~ believe that Tully was bald? On our two-scheme
hypothesis the answer is, quite properly, "Yes and no." On
the computational scheme, .~' s mental analogue of "Cicero was
bald" does not count as a 'Tully was bald'; ~'s mental
"Cicero" and his mental "Tully" play entirely different compu--
tational roles, even though they are in fact grounded in (are
representations of) one and the same person. On the semanti-
cal scheme, ~ does believe that Tully was bald, since that
scheme does count his inner analogue of "Cicero was bald" as a
'Tully was bald'. Thus, by providing for an ambiguity in the
reference of the plural demonstrative underlying the comple-
mentizer 'that', our Sellarsian account is able to predict and
explain our preanalytic uncertainity and disagreement about "~
believes that Tully was bald. 1125
6.
NOTES
REFERENCES
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Beliefs', Theory and Decision, 11.
Ackerman, Diana: 1979b, 'Proper Names, Propositional Attitudes
and Non-Descriptive Connotations', Philosophical Studies,
35.
Austin, David: in press, 'Plantinga's Theory of Proper Names',
Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, forthcoming.
Baker, L.R.: in press, 'Underprivileged Access', Nous, forth-
coming.
Bennett, Jonathan: 1976, Linguistic Behavior, Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, Cambridge.
Boer, Steven: 1984, 'Substance and Kind: Reflections on the
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Boer, Steven and W.G. Lycan: 1975, 'Knowing Who', Philosophi-
cal Studies, 28.
Boer, Steven and W.G. Lycan: 1980, 'Who, Me?', Philosophical
Review, 89.
Castaneda, H.-N.: 1966, '''He'': A Study in the Logic of Self-
Consciousness', Ratio, 8.
Castaneda, H.-N.: 1967, 'Indicators and Quasi-Indicators',
American Philosophical Quarterly, 4.
Davidson, Donald: 1968, 'Qn Saying That', Synthese, 19.
Dennett, D.C.: 1969, Content and Consciousness, Routledge and
Kegan Paul, London.
Dennett, D.C.: 1978, 'Brain Writing and Mind Reading', in
Brainstorms, Bradford Books, Montgomery, Vt.
1. INTRODUCTION
The traditional doctrine of intension and extension, enshrined
in nearly every elementary logic text (under the heading "Def-
initions"), is a litany of comfortable words. The extension
of a (singular or general) term is, we are told, the class of
things "it applies to", and its intension is that associated
feature of the term in virtue of which it so applies--roughly,
an assemblage of non-quest ion-begging necessary conditions
which are jointly sufficient for the term's application. For
most purposes, it is said, talk about the "meaning" of a term
may be construed as talk about its intension: in particular,
"knowing the meaning of a term" may be construed as knowledge
of its intension, i.e., having a "mental representation" of
the necessary-and-sufficient condition for its application.
This beguilingly simple picture has undergone much technical
refinement in the hands of logicians, whose formal implementa-
tions have contributed to its long and unbroken reign among
semantic theorists. .
Yet there is a disturbing intuition, voiced of late by
Kripke, Putnam, and others, that the Emperor has no clothes,
that the simple picture alluded to above cannot be the whole
truth about the referential mechanisms operative in natural
languages (though it may well be, and probably is, a correct
account of how some linguistic items function). Here am I,
the owner of five cats and a frequent user of 'cat'; surely I
would count myself a competent user of this word. After all,
I have (so I believe) no practical trouble when it comes to
identifying cats, and I have a fair amount of empirical knowl-
edge about their characteristics. But when I search for my
mental representation of the intension of 'cat', I come up
empty-handed. The best I can do is to describe the appearance
and behavior of typical cats and to point to some alleged
exemplars. But none of this adds up to a set of individually
necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for something's
being a cat: there may be atypical cats, who look and behave
quite differently; and things which look and behave as
described may not be cats. For all I know, there may be cat-
like marsupials which pass for cats in something like the way
in which koalas pass for bears; and even my own five might be
103
worse, has it that people have been using 'cat' (and its
ancestors) for centuries to talk about one and the same sort
of thing--cats--and that what has changed over time is merely
the content of our beliefs about cats. On the Intensional-
ist's picture, however, such continuity of reference would be
nothing short of a miracle. The best the Intensionalist dare
hope for is an historical series of intensions determining a
corresponding series of distinct but pairwise overlapping
extensions, for he must regard each shift in beliefs formu-
lated with 'cat' as (at least potentially) a shift in its
intension.! At this juncture the New Theory of Reference
reminds us of a simple but important fact: we often answer
questions of the form 'What is an I?' by pointing to (what we
take to be) some I-things and saying 'These, and things of the
same kind, are Is' or 'That sort of thing is an I'. Since
cats are nicely observable, this fact about questions and
answers suggests that an extension for 'cat' might be fixed,
without the need for any analytical definition, via some cere-
mony employing a formula like 'Let 'cat' apply exactly to
those things which are of the same kind as these things', the
referent(s) of the demonstrative being provided through osten-
sion of "paradigm" cats.
Two problems of interpretation immediately arise, one
regarding the indexical component in the envisaged reference-
fixing formula and the other concerning the ingredient phrase
'of the same kind as'. First of all, given a paradigm cat, X,
who or what determines when something is of the same kind as
X? Earlier we spoke of "experts"--why not let them decide?
The answer is obvious: if experts are just locally acknowl-
edged authorities, there is nothing to prevent (a) the experts
at a given time being ~ in their classifications, (b)
experts at a given time disagreeing among themselves, or (c)
experts at different times delivering wildly different ver-
dicts. Any of (a) - (c) would be destructive of the common-
sensical unity and continuity of reference so dear to the
heart of the New Theorist. Clearly somebody must have the
last word, if not the expert of today then perhaps future
experts. In line with this idea, it is often proposed that
the burden falls upon "Final Science", construed either real-
istically or in Peircean terms. Let us, then, swallow the
notion of Final Science for expository purposes and take 'is
of .the same kind as' to be tacitly qualified by the rider, 'by
the lights of Final Science'.
Zemach [1976) points to our second exegetical problem.
If the extension of 'cat' is thought of as an equivalence
class collectively generated by the speech community's para-
digm cats under the aforementioned sameness-of-kind relation,
we face the embarrassing possibility--indeed, the likelihood--
-that some of these paradigms are mistaken. There are, after
all, many sorts of animals and inanimate objects which, under
REFLECTIONS ON THE NEW THEORY OF REFERENCE 107
items in question.
Behind the introduction of an underlying trait term like
'jade' are two sorts of desires: on the one hand, the desire
to have a term covering the local things whose superficial
resemblance in certain respects has made an impression on us
(Le., whose similarities count as "important" relative to our
purposes and interests); and, on the other hand, the desire
that the term thus introduced should ultimately prove useful
in formulating "significant" inductive generalizations--a pro-
ject whose prospects for success vary inversely with the num-
ber of distinct natural kinds found within the term's exten-
sion to the extent that "significance" is determined Qy ~
scientific interests. Relative to other interests, however,
the proliferation of scientifically recognized kinds within
the paradigm-class may llQ1 destroy the possibility of using
the term to frame many "significant" generalizations. If one
is concerned with explanation and prediction only at a super-
ficial level, the deeper distinctions may not make any practi-
cal difference to one's enterprise; for even things with div-
erse natures may turn out to be predictably similar in the
respects which are important ~t the moment. Before pursuing
this line of thought any further, however, we must note an
additional complication.
We have simply taken for granted, as in the case of
'jade', that Final Science will provide a determinate answer
to the question of how many kinds of things or stuff are exem-
plified in the paradigm class, so that the term in question
will be said to have a determinate extension embr3cing just
those kinds. However plausible this supposition may be for
cases in which only chemical structure is at issue, it becomes
much less plausible when we begin to consider biological
kinds. Given a collection of superfically similar organisms,
there are many ways of individuating the "kinds" they exem-
plify, depending on what taxonomical level one has in mind:
species, genus, order, etc. If a term like 'beetle' or 'lily'
is to have a determinate extension, there must be a determi-
nate principle for sorting the paradigm-class; for it will
make a vast difference to the extension whether we include in
it simply the members of the particular species present in the
sample or include also the members of higher taxa exemplified
by those species. One of the points made by Dupre [1980] is
that there seems to be no nonarbitrary way of settling this
matter. (Dupre supposes that a single taxon must be at
issue, but the problem obviously remains even if we allow for
many-sorted extensions.) No matter what taxonomical level is
picked, there will be trouble somewhere. If, e.g., we count
only the species present in the sample, then we stipulate an
absurdly narrow extension for words like 'beetle'; for there
are hundreds of thousands of species of beetle, of which only
a small number are likely to have been represented in any
REFLECTIONS ON THE NEW THEORY OF REFERENCE 117
alter this fact. The upshot for (CT) is mixed. On the one
hand, we have seen reason to think that many ordinary biologi-
cal kind terms can plausibly be construed as underlying trait
terms, though only a small number will have extensions corre-
sponding to "biological kinds" in the sense of scientifically
recognized taxa. On the other hand, we have been forced to
concede that a good many common names of plants and animals
probably have not yet achieved the status of underlying trait
terms for the majority of English-speakers. To the extent,
however, that gestalt-terms tend to evolve into underlying
trait terms (at least for certain special-interest ~roups
within the speech community), the importance of (CT) will be
undiminished.
5. UNDERLYING TRAITS AND ANALYTICAL DEFINITIONS
The New Theorist's talk of "underlying traits", "hidden
natures", and the like has generated some confusion anent the
claim (Putnam [1975aJ, pp. 243-244) that even artifact-terms
are, or can evolve into, underlying trait terms. Schwartz
[1978] takes Putnam to task on this count, arguing that mem-
bers of artifactual kinds do not have, nor are they commonly
presumed to have, common underlying natures:
What makes something a pencil are superficial
characteristics such as a certain form and func-
tion. There is nothing underlying about these
features. They are analytically associated with
the term 'pencil', not disclosed by scientific
investigation. (Schwartz [1978], p. 571)
Schwartz asks us to imagine that pencils are discovered to be
organisms of some sort. Still, he insists, we would call any
subsequently manufactured item having the right form and func-
tion a pencil, regardless of the fact that it did not share
the organic nature of the "old" pencils. But, as Kornblith
[1980] correctly points out, this argument clearly rests upon
a false assumption: viz., that "underlying nature" can only
be understood in terms of a thing's composition. Once this
error is discarded, Kornblith says, there is nothing to pre-
vent the New Theorist from saying that function is the under-
lying nature of most if not all artifactual kinds. Whatever
one may think of this positive claim, this much seems clear:
underlying natures, though often "hidden" in the sense of
being unobservable or unknown, need not be so. Kripke [1972]
provides a case in point with his example of the Standard
Meter Bar. We may fix the extension of 'meter' by the indexi-
cal description 'length equal to the distance between the two
marks on this bar', thus making 'meter' an underlying trait
term in our sense; yet nothing mysterious, unobservable, or
120 S. E. BOER
underlying trait term that one and the same indexical descrip-
tion should function on Earth to pick out H20 and on Twin-
Earth to pick out XYZ. But such indexical descriptions,
though they can be used to fix the reference of 'water' at
given index (Earth vs. Twin-Earth), cannot be profitablY-
employed in an analytical definition of 'water'. For analyt-
ical definitions make the dp.finiendum synonymous with the
definiens. The extension of the definiendum at any world must
be just that of the definiens at that world; but indexicals in
the definiens will often shift their reference from world to
world, bringing about unwanted changes in the extension of the
definiendum. If, e.g., 'water' was simply definitional short-
hand for 'whatever the relevant experts at time 1, place R,
and world H call 'water", we would indeed get the desired
result that 'water' in our mouths has a different extension
from 'water' in Twin-Earthers' mouths, but only at the price
of being unable to entertain even the possibility that our
experts might be wrong! For at any index (1, R, H), the sen-
tence 'Water is just whatever the current local experts call
'water" will come out true (or at least not false). The
critic's injection of relational attitudes and divergent
speaker-meanings comes to no more than the proposal that each
ordinary user of 'water' (here or on Twin-Earth) mentally
associates with it some such indexical description on each
occasion of use, and that this description determines the
extension of 'water' as used on that occasion. But this
merely relocates the awkward consequence noted above, shifting
it from the language as a whole to each speaker's ideolect.
Instead of definitional shorthand in English, we have defini-
tional shorthand for a speaker on an occasion; and instead of
unwanted analyticities in English we have equally unwanted
analyticities-for-a-speaker.
The critic is thus faced by a dilemma. If, on the one
hand, 'water' is defined on each occasion of its use by the
indexical description associated with it on that occasion,
then much plausible counterfactual reasoning using 'water'
must become unintelligible to the user. If, on the other
hand, the associated indexical description is used merely to
fix the reference of 'water' in context and is not held to be
interchangeable with it, then we have a view very much like
(CT)--except that speakers will be constantly "reintroducing"
the term 'water', virtually every successive use amounting to
a reintroduction (Goldman [1979] actually proposes such a
view). In short, either the critic is just rejecting the
Kripke/Putnam intuitions about counterfactual reasoning out of
hand and thus securing Intensionalism by brute force, or else
his proposal does not constitute an Intensionalist alternative
at all. Until some argument is forthcoming to show that the
intuitions in question are unsound--and I know of no such
argument--Putnam's Twin-Earth argument stands untouched.
138
NOTES
REFERENCES
B. K. Matilal alld J. L. Sliall' (eds.). AIIGll'tieal Philosophy ill Comparative Perspective. 151-159.
@ J 985 bl' D. Reidel Publisliillg COlllpall'.
152 F. JACKSON
Monash University
NOTES
B. K. Matilal and 1. L. Shaw (eds.), Analytical Philosophy ill Comparative Perspeclive, 161-171.
1985 by D. Reidel Publishing Company.
162 K.SEGERBERG
2. FORMAL SEMANTICS
I rrII y(rr),
11011 the function f such that, for all
N E u, I(N) =-0,
11111 = the function I such that, for all
!! E 11, I(!!) = 11,
Iia n ~II = the function I such that, for all
!! E 11,
I(!!) = I a I (!!) n II~II(!!),
~ FwT, always,
~ Fw-L , np.ver,
3. LOGIC
(Rl) Real 1,
4. GOLDMAN'S CHALLENGE
The puzzles and questions collected by Alvin I. Goldman in the
first chapter of his book A Theory of Human Action constitute
a challenge for any theory of action. Ours has not yet been
developed to the point where it can take on this challenge in
full. Nevertheless, in this section we will try it on Gold-
man's curtain raiser, perhaps the least demanding of his exam-
ples:
What is an act? One of the problems con-
cerning the nature of acts is the problem of
individuation. Suppose that John does each of
the following things (all at the same time): (1)
he moves his hand, (2) he frightens away a fly,
(3) he moves his queen to king-knight-seven, (4)
he checkmates his opponent, (5) he gives his
opponent a heart attack, and (6) he wins his
first chess game ever. Has John here performed
six acts? Or has he only performed one act, of
which six different descriptions have been
given?
([21, p.l)
!i.I. Analysis
John plays white, and he intends to (try to) win. The trying-
to is a complication, but if we disregard that and stick to
our convention of identifying intentions with (the bringing
about of) events, then we may say that one of John's .inten-
tions is
A the event of Black's being checkmated.
~.J. Conclusion
Our analysis of Goldman's example registers both success and
failure. The success lies mainly in the fact that we have
been able to model Goldman's example in a reasonably faithful
manner, without sacrificing formal rigour. Perhaps it is also
fair to say that our analysis helps one to see why some
authors, such as Anscombe and Davidson, have wanted to say
that John "did just one thing" (the one-action view), while
others, for example, Goldman himself, have maintained that
John "did several things" (the many-actions view). The many-
actions view is supported by some features of our analysis:
John acted on a set of several distinct intentions, and he
realized a number of events, some of which were intended by
him. But other features support the one-action view: a uni-
que intention was operational, a unique routine was run, a
unique total change was wrought by John's action.
Causal and epistemic concepts are missing in our theory,
and perhaps this is its most notable defect. Adding such con-
cepts is a major task. A defect much easier to remedy is the
imperfect concept of change that goes with our present theory.
Our theory in effect identifies change with pairs of prior and
posterior states. This is a promising beginning but not
enough, a point made by Davidson in criticism of von Wright
([1), p. 113). Given that there is always a prior state and
usually a posterior one, why should there not be some in
between as well? In fact, if the actions analysed are not in
some strong sense atomic, then intermediate states will exist.
Thus what we need is a change function which does not pick
just one posterior state but rather a seguence of states, the
last one of which is the posterior state.
If our theory is improved by the addition of causal and
perhaps epistemic concepts, and the change function is
upgraded, then we will be in a better situation to meet the
full force of Goldman's challenge. Among inviting tasks for
future work are ei) to review concepts of agency and ability
along the lines suggested in [6); (ii) to give a systematic
account of what Goldman calls level generation; and (iii) to
provide for sequential action. For (iii) recent work done in
dynamic and process logic may be useful; see [3), [4), and
[5 J.
University of Auckland
MODELS FOR ACTIONS 171
REFERENCES
[8] von Wright, G.H.: 1963, Norm and Action, Routledge and
Kegan Paul, London.
Kalidas Bhattacharya
1.
The two terms 'The Morning Star' and 'The Evening Star' denote
one and the same thing and yet in the very act of denoting
it--one may say, for that denoting purpose itself--describe it
in two different ways. This is such a simple pheuomenon that
none but philosophers could get interested in it. May not a
particular thing, or even a particular class of things, have
two or more distinguishing features, and may we not distin-
guish it, specify it or point to it through anyone of these
features, 'through' meaning in most cases stating the feature
concerned in so many words? These features may, in their
turn, be complex, i.e. breakable into simpler constituents;
but, broken that way or not, they distinguish the thing only
as they are taken, in each case, in that complex form. May
be, at some incautious moments some unnecessary characters
creep unnoticed into the complex. But that is never a prob-
lem: sooner or later one will have to rid oneself of them,
and mostly when one resorts to analysis one do~s it precisely
for that kind of purge.
Nor do we, in our day-to-day life, complain against the
so-called indiscriminate use of terms like 'denote', 'de-
scribe', 'sense', 'meaning', or 'reference'. Every time in
the specific contexts in which these terms are spoken we quite
understand them, and when they sound ambiguous a little ques-
tioning here or some sifting there makes the speech intelligi-
ble. Why should one be so fastidious about precision in lin-
guistic expression unless one sets about purely mechanical
computation?
In common parlance we never also bother about what it is
that means, refers, etc., whether it is the word itself or the
speaker/hearer that uses 1 the word? For common people each
alternative is as good as the other. They know--instinc-
tively, if you like--that the words and their meanings, which
both they have learnt from others, mostly from the seniors of
their society, are but those which, equally, were used Qy
those others exactly with those meanings. Those others too
had learnt the same words and their meanings from their elders
in turn, and so on, which explains how a traditional (conven-
tional) relation, continued for a sufficiently long time,
passes for an objective situation over there. Toward the
173
3.
In the preceding section we held that if substantive words
mean things and qualities each in its isolated individuality,
a whole phrase, sentence or paragraph means a sort of complex
affair composed as much of these isolated individuals as also
of diverse relations between them, including the overt activi-
ties meant by certain verbs. 8
An important question which has, in this connexion, trou-
bled all linguistic philosophers, both in India and the West,
is whether the meaning of a sentence 9 is some sort of later
aggregation of the meanings of the individual words that com-
pose it or whether the whole meaning has somehow been
182 K.BHATTACHARYA
NOTES
l. INTRODUCTION
The concept of universal has been formulated in various ways
to solve various types of problems, to serve various, often
conflicting purposes. So a formulation specially suited to
solve one type of problem, fails, for that very reason, to
solve other, conflicting, types of problems. From the very
nature of the case it would appear impossible to have one con-
cept to do all of the work which is naively expected of it.
To explain our points we list, without attempting to be
exhaustive, nine different pairs of terms:
(1) universal --- particular
(2) abstract ---- concrete
(3) essence ----- accident
(4) form --- matter
(5) reason --- sense
(6) reality -- appearance
(7) a priori ---- a posteriori
(8) adjective substantive
(9) predicate --- subject
It is usual to connect, and where possible to identify, some
of the first terms of the pairs with universals and the corre-
sponding second terms with particulars. It is obvious that
the first terms of all the pairs cannot be identified with
universals. For example, if universals are regarded as reals
and particulars as appearances (pair (6, then it will not be
possible to identify them as predicates and subjects; for,
even if reality be regarded as a predicate, it will not do to
have reality as a predicate and an appearance as a subject of
a judgment (proposition, sentence). Moreover, the pairs
belong to different spheres--logical, epistemological, gram-
matical, ontological, etc.--and involve different types of
problems which require different methods of solution.
2. MEANING OF GENERAL TERMS AND UNIVERSALS
It is usual to introduce the concept of universal via a theory
of meaning of general terms, e.g., common nouns and
189
Calcutta University
202 s. BHATTACHARYA
NOTES
NOTES
7. "Anumitipratibandhakavatharthajnanavisaya~vam hetva-
bhasatvam" Annambhatta in his Dipika on Tarkasamgraha.
1.
B. K. Mati/al and 1. L. Shaw (eds.), Analytical Philosophy ill Comparative Perspective, 213-230.
1985 by D. Reidel Publishing Company.
214 K. H. POTTER
speech-act.
4.
more than one sense) that can be attached to the notion of the
same proposition falling under different descriptions, it is
not the same sense as the one used in Nyaya and natural to
speech-act theory. Whereas we can say, consistently with the
speech-act assumptions, that 5 said "g" intending I! as his
phrastic, even though "g" is conventionally understood by
hearers as meaning g, and thus 5 might be described as refer-
ring to I! under the description "g", this cannot be the case
of traditional analysis. What I refer to is not a matter of
my intentions for traditional analysis: it is a matter of what
words I do in fact use. I might try to mean I! by saying "q",
which is to say I might intend to be understood that way, but
what I referred to by uttering "g" was g.
5.
In recent years a number of us have been writing in English on
Navya-Nyaya and Indian logic generally, and the term "propo-
sition" has been bandied about freely. 50metimes these treat-
ments show ambiguity and/or confusion about the notion(s), as
in 5.S. Barlingay's A Modern Introduction to Indian Logic,
where a lot is said about "the Nyaya theory of propositions",
but it never is unambiguously clear what is being intended by
that expression. At some points it seems to be used synony-
mously with "assertive judgment",'2 at others we are told that
a proposition is different from a judgment,'3 at still others
the proposition is the predicate of the judgment,'4 and at
still others propositions are treated in the classical ana-
lyst's manner as bearers of truth-values. '5
In 1966 J.N. Mohanty published his classic Gangesa'~
Theory of Truth, in which he distinguished carefully between
judgments (jnana) and propositions. Nevertheless, he pro-
poses to term savikalpaka jnana "propositional", arguing
that "it is a logical complex analysable into constitutent
elements and relations."16 In Mohanty's review '7 of B.K. Mati-
lal's The Navya-Nyaya Doctrine of Negation 'B he pursues an
analogy between phenomenology in Brentano and Husserl and Nav-
ya-Nyaya's way of treating acts of awareness and their con-
tents. The analogy proves helpful but eventually breaks down
because Nyaya insists on the reality of both awareness and
content, whereas the phenomenological doctrine of intentional-
ity is "ontologically neutral". Nevertheless, it may be that
the phenomenological model is as good or 'better than the
speech-act model discussed here: my point is not that the
speech-act model is the only or even the best model, but only
that it is a superior model to classical analysis i~l terms of
propos i tions.
Matilal's book is admirably attentive to the distinctions
between propositions and acts of awareness, as well as to many
of the points made in the foregoing sections of this paper.
MODEL FOR UNDERSTANDING NAVYA-NYAYA EPISTEMOLOGY 225
6.
NOTES
1. INTRODUCTION
In this article, I shall focus on the four terms of the title.
The implications of the present remarks will be argued else-
where.
By the term "AE logics", I refer to a cluster of formal
machineries common to the Anglo-European tradition of formal
logic which range from syllogistic in its varied forms and
uses to the first order predicate calculus as used by Nyaya
scholars of this century. Coupled with these, are inter-web-
bed philosophies of logic and a whole variety of epistemologi-
cal, ontological and metaphysical doctrines and assumptions.
By the terms, "PA, Buddhist logic," etc., I refer to the
Indian Buddhist pramana vada doctrines regarding "anumana,
pararthanumana (cited hereafter as the "PA") svarthanu-
mana" and an analogous (and only analogous) not isomorphic,
cluster of epistemological, ontological and metaphysical doc-
trines and assumptions. In particular, I focus here on the
(so-called) "inference-schema" of the PA and some allegedly
relevant and/or compatible AE notions about formal logic(s)j I
note the very wide-spread use of the latter as a formalistic
target ideal language for the translation of the PA via the AE
logical machineries.
The AE and PA formal/formalistic logics are only the tips
of one iceberg of cognitive knowledge; formal logic is one
type of reliable human knowledge. Our attitudes about and
approaches to knowledge, are exceedingly varied and complex.
Also the "objects" of our inquiries are so complex, so intert-
wined, so varied, that the possible constellations of globally
oriented approaches and problems inherent in examining Bud-
dhist "perception," remain enormous. However, before I review
the relevant texts, let me state my views of the problems to
be examined.
This article remains heuristic rather than conclusive,
for the focus is logic, not epistemology.
What I wish to show here is that the range of things
which these early Indian Buddhist logicians meant by the term
"anumana," is not fully commensurate with what is meant when
most (if not all) twentieth century AE oriented Nyaya
231
found.
Thus the emic Buddhist logicians thought of anumana in
the PA as, first, a type of third person communicable ratioci-
nation, mitigated by generic concepts (samanya-Iak,a~a)
superimposed upon the flashing flux of pratyak,a; second,
anumana in the PA, admits of degrees of legitimacy which were
contingent upon the presupposed knowledge of the recipient of
the PA and the latter I s intellectual nimbleness. "3rd person
ratiocination" for "anumana" as in the PA, is compatible with
these assumed degrees of legitimacy; "inference" as in "infer-
ence-far-others" is not compatible with these degrees of
legitimacy for an AE deductive inference does not admit of
(such) degrees. An AE deductive inference is either valid or
it is not valid; such a choice about a PA is not disjunctive.
An additional point should be noted. The quality of a PA
admitting degrees of legitimacy contingent upon the communica-
tive context of speaker and recipient, is completely compati-
ble with the denial that the PA is isomorphic in form with a
true AE deductive inference. It is the number of required
members (avayava) of the PA which admits of degree, not the
invariable emic form of the PA nor the metalogical rules or
Nyaya metalogical theories of the PA. It is the latter emic
PA form, rules and Nyaya theories which render the PA non-de-
ductive and non-inferential; it is not the emic controversies
over the allowable degrees of the required components which
render the PA non-deductive and non-inferential.
6. ON ALTERNATIVE TRANSLATIONS OF PRATYA~~A AND ANUMANA
Consider the following translations:
Pratyaksa:
A) "Raw undifferentiated proto-perception."
Anumana:
B) "1st P SV 1st person differentiated
ratiocination."
c) "3rd P PA 3rd person differentiated
ratiocination. "
I draw the following conclusions about and justifications for
these new translations. First, "pratyak,a", by definition,
cannot be what we usually mean by the ordinary language (=OL)
term "perception". In OL, we usually assume that a perception
exhibits some differentiation and presupposes the discrete
isolatability of portions of what is perceived;19 this cannot
248 D. D. DAYE
make it inferential.
To the contrary, the requirement that the SV meet the
trirupa-hetu criteria involves the examination of the three-
fold relation or ratios of the presence and absence, of an
alleged concomitant binary set of properties. This examina-
tion of a possible concomitance is compatible with the trans-
lation of "anumana" as "ratiocination", in the first person
discursive vikalpa SV. The other descriptions in my justifi-
cation of these new translations also apply.
8. SUMMARY
To summarize, the PA is a type of anumana, but not necessar-
ily a type of "inference". The PA is a formalistic type of
third person, differentiated, discursive ratiocination poss-
essing a constant, highly stylized form, quasi-variables, a
metatheory of evaluating assertions, alleged concomitances and
possib}e errors. And in this century, this PA has been
alleged to be very similar to that of AE deductive logics;
obviously, I strongly question this latter assumption.
The SV aspect of anumana is distinguished by 1) its lack
of the PA form and metalogical machinery (as noted in the pre-
ceding paragraph), 2) its first person locus and 3) its
required satisfaction of the trirupahetu criteria.
Having stated all the preceding, it is my opinion that
the twentieth century habit of translating "anumana" by
"inference" has greatly misled and obscured the examination of
all these aspects of anumana. First, "inference" has misled
the reader (non-Sanskritists and many modern Sanskritists too)
in that it suggests that many true, deductive inferential fea-
tures are also to be found in SV. 'Second, I suggest that 1)
traditional aspects of anumana (SV and PA) are a type of
epistemological ratiocination about binary concomitances per-
formed subjectively or in a public, highly stylized, struc-
tured way, rather than 2) an almost universalized process of
proto-deductive inference making. Hence, 1) "anumana" as a
multi-sided type of ratiocination comes much closer to an
accurate description and explanation of anumana, as legiti-
mate knowledge, a) anumana as means and b) anumana as cogni-
tion or knowledge (anumana=jnana).
This section started with the question: "What kind of
anumana is the PA?" The answer is that the Buddhist Nyaya
PA is 1) a sub-type of Buddhist ratiocination which is 2) pub-
lic, third person, differentiation, discursive, 3) in a highly
stylized form, accompanied by, 4) a complex second order
theory of 4) detecting concomitances to support a conclusion,
for 5) detecting possible semantic and formalistic errors, by
utilizing, 6) metalogical cliches (proto- or quasi-variables)
and presumed structural relationships 7) for the general pur-
pose of justification by offering procedural exemplars
501\-11- l:PISTFMOLOGICALLY MISLIADING FXPRFSSION5 251
NOTES
8. Ibid., p. 37.
9. Ibid., p. 38.
10. Hattori, M.: 1968, Dignaga on Perception, Harvard Orien-
tal Series 47, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, p.
83.
14. Ibid.,p.187.
15. Sanghavi, op. cit., 1961, 85-86; the author has modified
this quotation.
16. Ibid., p. 86.
B. K. Matilal alld 1. L. Shaw (eds.), Analytical Philosophy il1 Comparative Perspective, 253-297.
1985 by D. Reidel Publishing Company.
254 M. SIDERITS
to make clear just what this means. Brough 5 gives the lan-
guage learning story a different twist. He claims that
related designation is supported by the view that we learn the
meanings of individual words through ~he process of insertion
and deletion Cavapa and udvapa). Yet here too we have an
account of language learning which is perfectly acceptable to
a designated relation theorist as well.
Bhishnupada Bhattacharya devotes a chapter of his A
Study in Language and Meaning to the dispute between related
designation and designated relation, and his introductory
remarks 6 give a good summary of the respective positions. But
his use of such terms as 'concept' and 'sense' throughout his
discussion is quite misleading, and his detailed examinatio~
is largely confined to relatively late texts which present
highly refined versions of the theories. Perhaps the clearest
and most accurate discussion of the related designation theory
is that of K. Kunjunni Raja. Through a detailed examination
of the works of Salikanatha, Kumarila, and others, he
brings out some of the chief arguments for and objections
against the theory. But he also repeats Jha's assertion that
the theory follows from the claim that we learn language only
from injunctions. And his summary comments are rather mis-
leading, particularly his claim that the related designation
theory is supported by 'the ubiquitous importance of context
as a deciding factor in determining the meaning of a word. ,7
If I understand this correctly, he is here asserting that
related designation is supported by such observations as that
'tiger' plays quite distinct roles in the two sentences, 'The
zookeeper fed the tiger,' and 'The tiger is a carnivore,'
referring in the first case to a particular tiger and in the
second case to the species of tigers. But the Prabhakaras
do not seem to have had such problems of disambiguation in
mind when they designed their theory. They seem rather to
have assumed that at least many of our words are strictly uni-
vocal in their literal uses, and they would claim that the
issues their theory is meant to address arise even in a lan-
guage with no ambiguous terms whatever.
I shall seek to present as clear and detailed a picture
of the Prabhakara position as possible. My chief sources
are Salikanatha and Ramanujacarya, but I shall also
make use of Jayanta's discussion of related designation in
Nyayamafijari. I shall examine some of the chief Prabha-
kara arguments for the theory, as well as the Prabhakara
replies to some of the more common objections to the theory.
What I ultimately hope to demonstrate is the importance of
attaining a clear conception of the theory, not only because
of the role it has played in Indian philosophy of language,
but also because of the role it can play in current philosoph-
ical semantics.
THE PRABHAKARA MIMAMSA THEORY or RELATFD DESIGNATION 255
and shown how the child can come to understand these sixteen
sentences by learning the designative powers of eight words.
Notice it is not claimed that the child cannot master any of
these sentences until he has learned the meanings of the com-
ponent words. As we shall see in more detail below, the Pra-
bhakara maintains that at the initial stage in the learning
process it is only whole $entences whose meanings are mas-
tered. He merely wants us to consider the consequence of sup-
posing that language learning must always proceed in this
fashion. The result is a veritable explosion in the number of
distinct sentence meanings which must be mastered one by one.
It is clearly preferable to suppose that the child, after mas-
tering some basic stock of sentences, learns to exploit the
phonetic, syntactic, and semantic regularities exhibited in
that stock in order to achieve mastery of additional sen-
tences.
Ramanujacarya advances a particularly telling version
of this argument when he points out that on the sentence
theory a sentence and its negation can bear no discernable
semantic relation to one another: the denial of a given sen-
tence transforms it into a distinct sentence of indeterminate
meaning. 15 Suppose a child to have mastered some 100 commands
of the 'Devadatta, fetch the cow' variety. She then learns
the corresponding prohibitions for four of the original com-
mands. Surely it is odd to suppose that she must learn the
meanings of each of the remaining prohibitions individually.
For surely she must be able, at some stage in the learning
process, to recognize the signficance of the negative particle
'rna' in prohibitions. There is an important datum to be
explained here, namely the facility with which the chId mas-
ters sizeable portions of the corpus once the language learn-
ing process is under way. A sentence theory is unable to
explain this fact, while a word theory gives a simple and more
plausible explanation.
The novel sentences objection l6 is another variant of
this basic theme. It is unlikely that the reader has previ-
ously encount~red the sentence, 'Devadatta the cowherd eats
three bowls of rice a day. I Yet we understand it. How can
this be accounted for on anything like a sentence theory?
Since on that theory the sentence is an indivisible semantic
unit, and since we understand the meaning of a sentence when
we know its satisfaction conditions, our. ability to understand
this sentence could be explained only by supposing that we had
prior knowledge of the relation between it and its satisfac-
tion conditions. An adequate explanation of this ability
requires acceptance of the composition principle, the princi-
ple that the meaning of a sentence is a function of the mean-
ings of the words out of which it is made up.
The Prabhakara thus rejects the sentence theory as
incompatible with the composition principle. But the
260 M. SIDFRlTS
the seeming plausibility which the theory gets from its sim-
plicity.
Of the various objections to the related designation
theory, that of mutual locus is the most frequently cited and
perhaps the most troublesome. It arises out of a dilemma
which is formulated by Salikanatha as follows:
that we have never before seen the word used to designate cow
in relation to feeding, is no bar to our understanding the
meaning of the sentence. And clearly, nothing could better
show our mastery of a word than our ability to understand
novel sentences in which it occurs.
Jayanta records another objection to the related designa-
tion theory which is not mentioned by either of our Prabha-
kara authors. 63 This concerns the processing of such semanti-
cally deviant sentences as, 'One hundred herds of elephants
are standing on a fingertip.' It is assumed ~hat this sentence
is literally meaningless, since the designated objects are not
fit to be related in the manner indicated in the sentence.
The objection is that on the related designation view the sen-
tence must nevertheless succeed in placing these entities in
mutual relation. The argument seems to be that we can know
these entities are not fit for relation only when the words of
the sentence have completed their designative functions; and
these functions are completed only when they bring about cog-
nition of mutual relation. The Bhatta opponent points out
that on the designated relation theory there is no ascertain-
ment of relation, since sentence meani~g is arrived at by
means of the expectancy, proximity, and semantic fitness of
the word meanings. That is, on this account we first cognize
the unrelated entities designated by the words of the sen-
tence, then become aware that some of these entities are not
fit to stand in the relations which the expectancies of the
words would require. This awareness of unfitness prevents us
from going on to apprehend the entities in mutual relation.
At this point it is claimed that such an expedient is not
open to the Prabhakara, and thus that he has no satisfactory
explanation of the semantic deviance of this sentence. If the
related designation theorist claims that semantic unfitness
blocks awareness of relation, then he is asserting that unfit-
ness blocks designation, which seems prima facie absurd: how
can we know that x and yare not fit for relation when x and y
have not yet been designated? Now Salikanatha suggested
one way out of this difficulty when he stated that in the
stage of recollection a word recalls its core meaning as
related to what is expectant, fit, and proximate. The related
designation theorist might perfectly well say that in the
'stage of consideration' we become aware that the recalled
own-meanings of the words are not fit for relation. But this
is not the solution which Jayanta reports the Prabhakara as
adopting. Instead he is described as embracing the conclusion
that semantically deviant sentences give rise to awareness of
relation. We compute the sentence meaning in the usual
fashion and then become aware that this meaning is contra-
dicted by knowledge obtained from another pramana. This
leaos us to reject the computed sentence meaning as semanti-
cally deviant. In the case of the present example, we already
THI PRABHAKARA MIMAMSA THLORY OF RELATED DISIGNATION 285
NOTES
2. Brough (1953).
8. Nyayafuanjari, p. 364.
9. Nyavamanjari, p. 367.
32-33.
18. Actually, none of the parties would say just this. The
Mimamsaka holds that the entity designated by 'cow'
is the universal cowness (with or without its relations
to other entities). The Naiyayaika holds that what is
designated by 'cow' is a particular inhered in by cow-
ness. We shall ignore this dispute for ease of explica-
tion.
68. Research for this paper was begun during an NEH Summer
Seminary for College Teachers on the topic of formal
semantics and natural language, conducted by Professor
Richard Grandy at Rice University in the summer of 1982.
This paper was completed with the support of an NEH Sum-
mer Research Stipend for the summer of 1983. The support
of the National Endowment for the Humanities is greatly
appreciated. The following individuals contributed help-
ful comments and criticism during various stages of this
project: Richard Grandy, J.N. Mohanty, Bimal K. Matilal,
and Kenton F. Machina.
THE PRABHAKARA MIMAMSA THEORY OF RELATED DESIGNATION 297
REFERENCES
Quine
(From a Logical Point
of View (1963), p. 2)
1.
Ksanabhangasiddhi Vyatirekatmika
This reply of Ratnakirti is again based on Jnanasri's
remark:
302 A. CHAKRABARTI
move at the same time. They jump from the truth of W, forget-
ting, as it were, the secondary occurrence of the empty defi-
nite description "Wittgenstein's wife" in W', to the ontologi-
cal observation that the non-existent object fitting that
description really possesses the property of not being tall.
But this property of non-tallness is never identical with that
of Qeing short or of normal height. Ratnakirti remarks:
Three sorts of properties are found. Some sit
always on real objects, e.g. the colour blue.
Some, as a rule, go with unreal objects, e.g.
total lack of specifiability. Some again are
found in real and unreal objects, e.g. mere
non-apprehension [both an existent and a non-ex-
istent black cat may remain unseen in a dark
room] .
McDermott, p. 19.
It is agreed that some negative properties, in fact most
of them, belong both to real and unreal objects, but there are
some like lack of activity, lack of momentariness and lack of
positive description which are true only of non-existents. To
quote Ratnakirti again
We may say in this context that just as we find
usage of words in the manner of property and
propertied about real entities, e.g. cowness in
a cow, whiteness in a cloth, running in a horse,
the same property-propertied mode of speaking is
also found about unreal objects, e.g. lack of
sharpness in a rabbit horn, absence of speaker-
hood in a childless woman's son, the scentless-
ness of a sky-lotus etc.
A.I.Y., p. 65.
This last point brings us to the most interesting use that
Udayana--surprisingly--makes of the Meinongian characteriza-
tion principle. He surely does not hold the position himself
that the son of a childless mother really belongs to the class
of sons. (Did even Meinong seriously believe so?)
Although the dispute here has a tendency to lose itself
in sophistry, certain interesting and profound differences of
the basic Nyaya and Buddhist semantic outlook have come to
the surface in this dialogue.
Udayana, too, would have no doubt assented to the de
dicto claim that it is not the case that speakerhood belongs
to the childless woman's son. But the moment it is taken de
re by the Buddhists as a case of a presence of speechlessness
in an object of disingenuous reference, he would ask the
PLATO'S INDIAN BARBERS 307
A.I.Y., p. 67.
It is only with a mock sympathy with common usage of
empty terms in language that the Buddhists say that, after
all, we do talk intelligibly about non-entities. They first
use the Russellian device of negation governed utterances
"about" non-things like tortoise-wool, but then use that pho-
ney topichood of unreal objects to construct a superficial
Meinongian ontology of given fictions (vikalpas). The ten-
dency'is to blur the distinction between empirically real,
stable objects like hills and houses, pots and people on the
one hand and figments of imaginaion on the other. Hence, the
identification of property bearers with property repellers,
which suits them quite well since, in their polemic against
the reality of universals, they construe all subsumption under
F as exclusion from non-F. Their ontology is, in a way, like
that of Meinong seen in a photographic negative. While Mein-
ong objectifies non-existents as independent of our awareness,
the Buddhists relegate the conventionally objective substances
into mere linguistic and cogliitional fictions. The incoher-
ence in the Buddhists position that Udayana labours to pin-
point becomes clear when you notice how it tries to lend sup-
port to a proto-Meinongian ontology by justifying negative
assertions with vacuous subject-terms with a Russellian trick
over the scope of negation. A spurious object like the rab-
bit-horn is not fit to hold even a real absence. If it is
said to be non-sharp simply because it is not there to be
sharp, that is surely not its being non-sharp. As we have
seen earlier, the Nyaya takes absences so seriously that
without definite checkable information about its absentee's
residence, it would never accept a particular absence.
In course of debate Udayana draws his opponent into a
circular reasoning. When the negative attribution of speech-
lessness is construed by Udayana as a positive ascription of
agency to something other than speech, the Buddhists protest
that this cannot be done because the non-entity is devoid of
all agency. How does he establish that the non-entity cannot
act? From the simple premise that it is not existent. But
what is the reason for failing to exist? The fact that it
cannot act to be sVre.19
Such a circulArity, of course, might not be too frighten~
ing to the Buddhists because they expressly take the statement
308 A. CHAKRABARTI
A.I.Y., p. 69.
The risk of rulelessness (aniyama) looms as the main
resistance that Udayana feels against non-entities entering
the domain of linguistic or cognitive reference. We do not
genuinely understand a statement about a non-entity because we
have no definite means to say when such a statement would be
true and when false. Empty predictes are inadmissable because
their application is not directly learnable (except in terms
of other non-empty predicates) and also because there is no
objective way of distinguishing the ranges of two such differ-
ent predicates (like " ... is a bander snatch" and " ... is a
flibbertigibbet") without reducing them to their instantiated
consti tutents.
In a ~trikingly Stawsonian tone Udayana remarks:
A.I.Y., p. 69.
Since the double defects of (a) absence of evidence and (b)
inconsistency (insofar as the alleged answer about his com-
plexion implicates an already disowned knowledge of the exis-
tence of the person) equally infect both the contrary answers,
neither of them can be preferred to the other.
Udayana now anticipates another epistemological defence
of the Buddhist position in favour of non-actual intentional
objects. It is not correct to maintain that we talk only
about what we have knowledge of. Don't we talk about the con-
tent of our illusions, the horrifying monster I hallucinated
the other night or the tortoise hair that a child seemed to
see from a distance (mistaking the grooves on the shell for
hair)? When cognitions of such figments arise, they come to
us with a clear differentiation of their objects. We do
PLATO'S INDIAN BARBERS 309
(a.I.Y., p. 75).
Udayana rejects this by appealing to what he takes to be
the standard way of grasping the meaning of a new word. When
we first hear the sentence "Rope the cow" we do not rest sat-
isfied by telling ourselves that those sounds must have some
meaning that their utterer intends them to have, without both-
ering to look around for an object or an activity with which
the distinguishable parts of that string of noise may corre-
spond. The language instruction which always keeps us afloat
at the level of "What the speaker intends to mean by those
sounds" gets us nowhere. We never know a language by merely
referring to some unidentified indefinite objects of a wish to
refer which we believe accompanies others' use of words.
At this juncture another doctrine of understanding is
provisionally attributed to the Buddhists. According to it,
the fictional objects are just creations of our own individual
emotions and other coloring effects of memory and desire. The
child wishes to ride a horse so strongly that it finds a live
horse in a stick with a curved handle, not looking even
remotely like a horse's head. A man madly afraid of murder
sees a dagger in the air. Our desires and fears cook up fan-
tasies and dreams which provide referents for our vacuous
terms.
But then your chain of desires will create an entity dis-
tinct from mine, and the two creatures would inhabit com-
pletely different worlds. Those worlds being private and
insulated ones, you will know nothing definite about my object
of fantastic reference, and I will have, at best, a guess as
to what your objects of reference are.
How can two men, completely ignorant of each
other's contents of information, communicate
about the nature of those contents?
a.I.Y., p. 76
314 A. CHAKRABARTI
Our talk about such fictional items would then never be meant
for others--and Udayana hints that such a private language
would not be a language.
To make someone else understand what I mean by a word, I
must be able either
(a) To publicly handle the object(s) denoted, or
3. BHART\\HARI
Merely on the basis of words heard men are found
to apply the category of a thing, even to
totally unreal objects like the so-called cinder
cycle. 24
Vakya Padiya, 1/129
PLATO'S INDIAN BARBI RS 315
Ibid., p. 449
and that is precisely the use into which Bhartrhari puts it.
To the fact that "we play fast and loose" with the refer-
ential apparatus of our language, indifferently using expres-
sions like "Mr. Pickwick", "Abraham Lincoln", "Mrs. Thatcher",
320 A. CHAKRABARTI
NOTES
10. Ibid.
REFERENCES
Bhattacharya, G.: 1978, Navya-Nyaya--Some Logical Problems in
Historical Perspective, Delhi.
Bhartrhari: 1974, Vakyapadiya, vols. I and III, ed. Raghu-
nath Sharma, Varanasi.
Cartwright, R.L.: 1963, 'Negative Existentials', in C.E. Caton
(ed.), Philosophy and Ordinary Language, University of Illi-
nois Press.
Chakrabarti, A.: 1982, 'The Nyaya Proofs for the Existence of
the Soul', Journal of Indian Philosophy, September 1982.
Chakrabarti, K.: 1978, The Logic of Gotama, University of
Hawaii.
326 A. C'HAKRABARTI
Shaw, J.L.: 1974, 'Empty Terms: The Nyaya and the Buddhists',
Journal of Indian Philosophy 2, 332-343.
Strawson, P.F. (ed.): Philosophical Logic, Oxford.
Udayana: 1940, Atmatattva Viveka, ed. D. Shastri, Benares.
PROPER NAMES: CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY AND THE NYAYA
1.
B. 1\, Matila! a/1(! J. L. Shall' (eds.), Alla!l'tiea! Philosophl' ill COfllparatil'c Perspecti"", 3 ~ 7-3 7~.
r!) 1985 hI' D. Reidel Pl/h/ishillg COli/pail)'.
328 J. L. SHAW
Again he said:
occurs.
The first two theses may be taken as linguistic or syn-
tactic characterization of a proper name, (3) and (4) as
semantic characterization, and the last two as epistemic char-
acterization of a proper name.
Now let us discuss the view of Kripke who has criticized
the views of philosophers like Frege, Russell, Strawson,
Searle and Wittgensteiri. It is claimed that he has introduced
a new theory of proper names, which has not been introduced by
any of his predecessors.
Kripke claimed that Frege and Russell have equated the
meaning or the sense of a proper name with the sense of a def-
inite description. With respect to this view he said: "I
think it is pretty certain that the view of Frege and Russell
is false."28 According to him many philosophers who claim to
reject the theory of Frege-Russell "have used the notion of
cluster concept."Z9 On Kripke's interpretation Wittgenstein
has equated the meaning of a proper name with that of a family
of descriptions. In order to substantiate this view he has
quoted paragraph 79 from Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investi-
gations. It is doubtful whether we should attribute such a
theory of proper names to Wittgenstein. It seems to me that
Wittgenstein is explaining certain uses of proper names in our
ordinar~ language. Perhaps there is no one theory for
explaining the different uses of a proper name according to
Wittgenstein.
It is also claimed that according to the view of Searle
or Strawson "the referent of a name is determined not by a
single description but by some cluster or family.ft30 Kripke
has formulated the description theory of proper names in the
following way:
(1) To every name or designating expression
'X', there corresponds a cluster of properties,
namely the family of those properties ~ such
that ~ believes 'OX'.
(2) One of the properties, or some conjointly,
are believed by A to pick out some individual
uniquely.
(3) If most, or a weighted most, of the ~'s
are satisfied by one unique object y, then y is
the referent of 'X'.
(4) If the vote yields no unique object, 'X'
does not refer.
(5) The statement, 'If X exists, then X has
most of the ~'s' is known ~ priori by the
PROPER NAMES: CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY AND THE NYAYA 337
speaker.
Great'.
1\
sion and 'v' stands for the
referent of '~'.
samketa Laksana
' k t / \parl'bh--
~ asa
Each of the terminal nodes can be classified further
depending on the direction of the relation between an expres-
sion and its referent or referents.
From the above discussion it follows that the Nyaya
emphasizes the conventional nature of the relation between an
expression and its referent or referents, and the distinction
between the two types of primary relation depending on whether
the convention is ancient or modern.49 The Nyaya use of the
term 'sakti' is to be interpreted as an ancient conventional
relation between an expression and its referent or referents,
and the term 'paribhasa' is to be considered as a modern
conventional relation between an expression and its referent
PROPER NAMES: CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY AND THE NYAYA 347
or referents. 5o
Now let us introduce the Nyaya discussion of the meaning
of a corrunon noun such as the word 'cow'. In this context I
would like to introduce the neutral word 'meaning-complex'
which refers to the second member of a meaning-relation whose
first member is an expression. The Nyaya deals with the
question whether the meaning-complex includes the particulars
to which an expression applies or the universal of which the
particulars are instances, or the configuration (akrti) of
the particulars. According to the old Nyaya the meaning-com-
plex includes the universal or the class-character (jati),
the configuration (akrti) of the particulars, and the par-
ticulars. 51 So the meaning-complex of the word 'cow' includes
particular cows or the cow-individuals, the class-character,
i.e., cowness, and the configuration (akrti) of particular
cows. According to the old Nyaya it is one meaning-relation
which relates the word 'cow' to the meaning-complex which
includes three types of entities. 52
Now the question is how the expression 'particular cows
or cow-individuals' and 'configuration of particular cows' are
to be understood. By the word 'cow-individuals' we should
understand particular cows without their qualities and rela-
tions. If the cow, say i!, is white, and the cow, say h, is
black, then by the word 'cow-individuals' we should understand
i! and h without their colors. Similarly, i! and h are to be
taken without their other properties except properties like
beinR this or that individual. Even the class-character is
excluded from i! and h. The expression 'configuration
(akrti) of cow-individuals' refers to the parts of the cow-
individuals, which are related in a particular manner in a
particular cow. Let us consider the particular cows, i! and h.
Cow i! has parts such as a tail, a head, four legs, and a body,
which are related in a particular way. Similarly, cow h has
the same type of parts which are related in the same way.
Symbolically, the parts of i! and h can be represented in the
following way:
(1) R (a 1, a2, a3, a.),
(2) R (b 1, b 2 , b 3 , b.),
the case of a general term such as 'COW'. The words like '.i!-
kasa' ('sky' or 'ether'), and a proper name such as 'John'
are included in this category. Hence the meaning of a proper
name is an individual object which is devoid of any universal
or class-character (jati).67 Here the word 'individual
object' does not mean 'object along with its properties and
relations', but rather 'object devoid of all its properties
and relations!. So the meaning of a name such as 'Socrates'
is the individual Socrates. The supporters of this view
reject the thesis that the meaning of a proper name can be
expanded in terms of a set of definite descriptions on the
following grounds. 68
If the meaning of the name 'Socrates' is equated with the
meaning of 'the teacher of Plato', then the sentence 'Socrates
is the teacher of Plato' becomes an identity sentence such
that the mode of presentation or the limitor of the subject
(uddesvatavacchedaka) is the same as the mode of presenta-
tion or the limitor of the predicate. In other words, the
limitor of the referent which corresponds to the subject-ex-
pression would be the same as the limitor of the referent
which corresponds to the predicate-expression. Hence the sen-
tence 'Socrates is the teacher of Plato' would not be differ-
ent from the sentence 'The teacher of Plato is the teacher of
Plato'. According to the Nyaya if the limitor of the subject
is the same as the limitor of the predicate, then the sentence
does not generate any cognition. That is to say, neither the
hearer nor the speaker of this sentence would understand the
meaning of it as distinct from the meanings of its parts.
This follows from the Nyaya theory of qualificative cogni-
tion.
According to the Nyaya cognitions are of two types,
viz., qualificative and non-qualificative. In this context by
the word 'cognition' we refer to the object or the content of
a cognition. A qualificative cognition can be expressed by a
complex expression of the form 'aRb'. A qualificative cogni-
tion involves necessarily ~t least three epistemic elements,
viz., a qualificand, a qualifier, and a relation between them.
The relation between the qualificand and the qualifier at cog-
nitive level is called the 'qualification relation' ('vis-
esya-visesana-sambandha'). At the ontological level
there might not be three elements corresponding to a qualifi-
cative cognition. Let us consider the cognition of a pot,
which is one of the simplest cognitions. The content of this
cognition has a pot as its qualificand, potness as its quali-
fier, and the relation of inherence as its qualification
relation. Since a pot is cognized under a mode of presenta-
tion, this cognition is considered as a qualificative cogni-
tion. Since a relation relates the qualifier to the qualifi-
cand, this type of cognition is also called 'relational
cognition'. Even the cognition represented by a proper name,
PROPER NAMES: CONTLMPORARY PHILOSOPHY AND THE NYAY A 355
NOTES
REFERENCES
Alston, W.P. and G. Nakhnikian (eds.): 1963, Readings in Twen-
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Angelelli, I.: 1967, Studies on Gottlob Frege and Traditional
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Bagchi, J.: 1981, Vakyartha Nirupaner Darsanika Pad-
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Bell, D.: 1979; Frege'~ Theory Qf Judgment, Clarendon Press,
Oxford.
Bhattacharya, P. (ed. and tr.): Bengali year 1377,
Bhasaparicchedah with Siddhanta-muktava1i, Sanskrit
Pustaka Bhandar, Calcutta.
Bhattacharya, S.: 1976, 'Some Principles and Concepts of Nav-
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Davidson, D. and G. Harman (eds.): 1972, Semantics of Natural
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Devitt, M.: 1981, Designation, Columbia University Press, New
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Dummett, M.: 1973, Frege Philosophy of Language, Duckworth,
London.
Dummett, M.: 1978, Truth and Other Enigmas, Harvard University
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370 J. L SHAW
Shaw, J.L.: 1974, 'Empty Terms: The Nyaya and the Buddhists',
Journal of Indian Philosophy 2, pp. 255-266.
Shaw, J.L.: 1978, 'The Nyaya on Existence, Knowability and
Nameability', Journal of Indian Philosophy 5, pp. 255-266.
For nobody would claim here that the hearer who understands
the sentence could bring a non-chair, something else that may
be qualified by being in the thought of the speaker, and still
be said to behave correctly. For successful behavior the
hearer must be aware, from the utterance of "it", of the
actual chair qualified by chairhood.
Gadadhara says that of course the "it" in the above sen-
tence presents the chair, i.e. the object qualified by chair-
hood, in the awareness of the hearer, but the hearer's route
to capture this object is rather an irrelevant qualifier or
distinguisher, that of being in the thought of the speaker.
The latter property is an irrelevant distinguisher or identi-
fier of the object (an upalaksana) in the sense already
described; after the object has been identified, its function
as a distinguisher comes to an end. The said property cer-
tainly provides the unifying character needed for our acquir-
ing the knowledge of the denoting power of "it", but it is not
part of its meaning. It is only a catalyst-agent, being not
relevant to what is said or what we may continue to say.
After helping the hearer to identify the object of bringing,
it ceases to be operative. There are, of course, many other
problems that arise in the case of such indexicals, and Gada-
dhara discusses them to some extent. 11 But I forbear to enter
into them here.
390 B. K. MATILAL
NOTES
abstraction, 189-201.
accessibility relation, 50.
accident, 189.
Ackerman, Diana, 96.
action, 24-26, 161-170, 215.
'adheya, 16.
atiliryajnana, 314.
'akallkia, 34, 218, 351.
akankiabha~ya, 352, 353.
akhap9a-upadhi, 357, 378.
~, 347-348.
analysis, 189-201.
analytical definitions, 119.
Anscombe, G. E. M., 2, 24.
antya-vise~a, 357.
anubhava, 206.
anumtana, 30, 31, 231-247.
anumiti, 239.
anumi tikaraI;1a, 239'.
anuyogin, 349, 355.
anvaya, 353.
anvayabodha, 351.
anyattlakhyati, 4, 228.
apoha, 36.
393
394 INDEX
a posteriori, 9, 189.
a 2riori, 9, 179, 189, 330, 375.
Aqvist, L. E. G. , 53, 58.
artha, 33, 35l.
arthapatti, 263.
atmakhyati, 4.
Austin, J. L.,. 215, 226.
avacchedaka, 10, 18, 22, 27, 348.
avacchedaka-dharma, 355, 357.
avacchedakata, 349.
awareness, 34, 373-380.
Ayer, A. J., 200.
Baker, L. R., 82.
Bambrough, R., 200.
Barlingay, S. 5., 224.
belief sentences, 81-86, 106.
Bhartrhari, 32, 37, 314-320.
Bhattacharya, B., 254.
Bhattacharya, K., 26, 173.
Bhattacharya,S., 28, 189, 225.
BOer,S., 21, 103.
INDEX 395
Jnana~ri, 30l.
Putnam, H., 103, 104, 105, 119, 128, 133, 135, 138, 146.
qua1ificand, 360.
qualifier, 360, 373, 377, 380.
qualitative identity, 62.
quality, 20, 219.
Quine, W. V. 0., 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 12, 13, 36, 51, 58, 61, 64, 65, 71, 76.
77, 151, 192, 194, 215, 290.
/
Raghuriatha Siromapi, 351, 362, 363.
Ramsey, F. P., 190.
Ramanujacarya, 254-283.
RatnakIrti, 301.
realization operator, 163.
reference, 19, 33, 81-95, 103-145, 173, 299-322, 327-330, 333-335, 337-345,
373.
referential intension, 108.
referential opacity, 85-86.
related designation, 31, 253-292.
rigid designator,S, 81-85, 130-135, 338.
Rosenberg, J., 87.
sakti. 11.346.
saktigraha. 384.
sakya. 28. 176. 349.
sakyata. 22. 349.
sakyatavacchedaka. 176. 177. 349. 360.
~a1ikanatha. 254-2d4.
samavaya. 220.
samketa. 345-346.
Sanghavi. S 236. 239. 245. 246.
sannidhi. 218, 352.
sapak~a. 235.
satkhyiiti, 4.
savika1paka, 216, 224, 354-356.
Schwartz, S., 10, 119, 130.
Searle, J., 30, 228, 336.
Segerberg, K., 24, 25, 161.
Sellars, W., 86, 87.
sense, 26, 33, 35, 81-84, 210, 329-333, 342-343.
Shaw, J. L., 23, 327.
Siderits, M., 31, 253.
singular terms, 62, 81-95, 103, 328-364.
Skyrms, B., 39, 40, 42, 43, 53, 56, 58.
speaker's meaning, 181-186.
speech acts, 30, 213-227.
INDEX 405
vi?ayata, 17
. -'
vlseaQa, 10, 216, 237, 354, 360, 373, 388.
I
vise?ya, 216, 226, 360, 388.
~ I
vise?ya-vise~~a-sambandha, 354.
Vui1lemin, J., 65.
Waragai, T., 68, 70.
Ware, R., 136.
Wimsatt, W. C., 88.
Wittgenstein, L., 62, 200, 214, 220, 336.
world lines, 83-85, 95, 96.
Wright, C., 151.
Wright-Sudbury recipe, 153-155.
yogyata, 218, 352.
Zemach, E., 106, 108, 110, Ill, 114, 136.